Children's Literature

"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.”

— Opening of The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford

Who can remember what childhood was really like? Who would really want to? What comes back to me of childhood are a few hazy outlines, like half-remembered snippets of dreams glimpsed just before awakening and quickly forgotten. As a child, I’m sure I knew that the world around me was a very real place and that I was indisputably its center, but I somehow can’t recapture the innocence of a boyish imagination still unclouded by age or experience. Perhaps it’s the natural order of things that such perceptions disappear, which is why most authors can never truly portray children or childhood. Even if you rattle off the names of a dozen wonderful stories or novels which seem to do just that (To Kill a Mockingbird springs to mind), these are still only the clever impersonations of children filtered through adult sensibilities.

A work which does present an authentic child’s view of the world, however, is The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena’s Plan written by Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (“Daisy”) and concerning not children and their habits but manners, class, courtship and marriage in Queen Victoria’s England. The manuscript was handwritten in a red-covered exercise book in 1890, when the precocious Daisy was nine years old. Here was a child who, from the earliest age, seems to have been permitted unlimited access to the family library and to have absorbed whatever she wanted of its contents, principally Victorian fiction, whose tone and trappings she made irresistibly her own.

Why read this short novel? Because it presents a picture of the Victorian world, refracted through the prism of its literature and transformed once again by the perceptions of a bright and uncannily observant child who is, underneath it all, still very much a child. The result is an unintentionally hilarious comic masterpiece which has not been out of print since its first appearance in 1919.  read more »

Last weekend, as I sat and ate my lunch in Bryant Park, I had the unexpected treat of listening to Geoffrey Hayes read from his children’s comic book Benny and Penny in Just Pretend. The day’s readings and activities were linked to Children’s Book Week, which runs all this week. And I left the park thinking about children’s books that I loved when I was little—books that encouraged me to make, create, and play.

One of the books that I spent hours and hours with as a youngster was Steven Caney’s Play Book, which I have become reacquainted with thanks to the copy at the Children’s Center at 42nd Street. This book is one of several creative play books by Caney, a noted toy maker and designer. His projects all encourage hands-on building, pretending, playing, and inventing, and most draw upon everday materials that a family might already have on hand. Paging through it, I remembered the fun and discovery I felt as I tackled many of the projects—from secret codes to musical nails, from salt gardens to bottle gardens.

Do you have a favorite DIY book from when you were small? Perhaps we have it at NYPL—come into the library or look in our catalogs (Leo or Catnyp) and see what books, both new and old, we have waiting for you and the young makers in your life.

Last week in the South Court training rooms, I gave my presentation “Changing Styles in Children’s Literature.” Although I’ve given this talk on various occasions over the last few years, doing it again always focuses my attention on the strange power of children’s books and sets my mind spinning back to my own dim past, when I would stare up at the family shelf of books in a kind of awed yet uncomprehending fascination. I might not have been aware of much else, but I already knew that those books were the key to some unknown yet highly desirable place. They were full of pictures which created interesting puzzles for me to resolve and indecipherable words which nonetheless buzzed with elusive possibilities.

Scientifically speaking, learning to read is a step-by-step process, each incremental bit building up a solid foundation. In memory, however, it seems much more of a magical transformation. My mother would read the words, I would look at the pictures, and they were always two separate levels of enjoyment. Until a certain memorable day when I began to recognize the actual words myself (something like, “Brontosaurus was a plant-eater”) and suddenly the whole enterprise gelled into one big, amazing package. I would no longer have to make up my own stories to go along with the pictures. And those blocks of text took on a resonance I had never even suspected.

In some ways, this process of integrating words and pictures mirrors the two faces of children’s book illustration, particularly during the twentieth century. One the one hand, there are the artists who stress the individual illustration, without too much concern over the accompanying text. On the other hand, there are those who attempt to blend text and image into a richer whole. Throughout my own readings prior to giving my talk, two names kept emerging: Arthur Rackham and Maurice Sendak. They are the two inescapable masters of children’s picture-making, although each seems to represent an opposite end of the spectrum.  read more »